[grabbalacious]

I started near the end and thought that Columbo had been shot by the mafia. As in Lieutenant Columbo. The horror!

More seriously, though, they're great movies and I enjoyed them.

Can't help feeling though that some people come away with the wrong message: they think that mafia morality is how the world really works and so they must now embrace it.

Instead of noticing that Michael Corleone was trying to escape from it all and create a different life for his children. A life without the threats and violence.

(And then I think, hmm, perhaps mafia morality is still alive and well. It's merely that instead of being assassinated people are being deplatformed, disemployed, etc.)

[wwright]

Deplatforming and disemploying is fundamentally different in that it works by social consensus rather than an individual “fiat,” at the very least. I can’t deplatform you without getting the agreement of all relevant platforms.

That’s one big difference in the things you are comparing, without diving too deep into a different topic.

[grabbalacious]

Good point. Although I think it tends to be a consensus among an influential minority of the populace rather than society as a whole.

[philwelch]

Mob rule is never actually mob rule, there's a complicated relationship between the mob and the demagogues who alternately control the mob while also being controlled by it.

[lowdose]

Controlled opposition while shuffling the real dirty jobs on them and maintaining plausible deniability.

[wwright]

That is fair, but realistically, I think that’s every social consensus… and the implications are much more far reaching than social media platforms :-)

[krapp]

Every motive factor in "society" is a consensus among an influential minority rather than the whole. Society is not a unified entity, nor are its boundaries even strongly defined, so there cannot be a consensus among a "whole" which doesn't exist.

[grabbalacious]

Well, that's OK, provided we're honest about what it is, e.g. we don't use media to create the illusion of a majority consensus where none exists.

[cheese4242]

"Social consensus" in the case of deplatforming is a handful of yuppy bureaucrats in Silicon Valley deciding what people far less privileged than themselves are allowed to say.

It's not fundamentally different, just much more effete.

[wwright]

To confirm, your argument is that refusing to allow someone to advocate for genocide on your blog platform is fundamentally similar to killing a man for refusing to pay protection money?

[ufmace]

This is a standard tactic of those in the deplatforming business - to claim that everything they are deplatforming is the same thing as advocating for genocide. It's a terrible argument, and the moral equivalent of asking somebody if they've stopped beating their wife.

If you can't make a good argument for deplatforming a specific person based on the specific things they've actually said, then maybe, just maybe, you're the bad guy.

[cheese4242]

Exactly. They jump to the most extreme case to try and put you on the defensive.

It is a smoke screen for what this is all about: silencing dissent and controlling what people are allowed to say.

[wwright]

In this case, I am speaking about the general act of deplatforming vs mafia hits. A great deal of people HAVE been banned from platforms for explicitly advocating genocide; that’s an actual thing that happens fairly regularly.

Many are deplatformed for other things, of course, and I would never say that everyone who is banned from a platform is banned for good reasons. But there are a lot of assholes out there in need of banning, imo.

[cheese4242]

Ludicrous hyperbole and a clumsy attempt at shaming.

[wwright]

It was a sincere question — are we talking about mafia killings and deplatforming, or something else?

[jimmaswell]

I'm thinking of when they tried to deplatform the trans activist youtuber Contrapoints over one trans person who guest starred on her show one time turning out to have a view of certain gender things those people didn't like. The host probably wasn't even aware and it's gotten absurd how this can happen with such a degree of separation - dare to even interact with somebody guilty of wrongthink and now you and everyone you've associated with is also guilty and eaten alive. Very absolutist and reminds me of brainless zero tolerance policies in public education.

[rusk]

I thought the point was that this was the way the world worked and that you couldn't get out of it. That, and the fact that good men are forced to do bad things by circumstances.

[philwelch]

I don't see Michael Corleone as a good man, and I think the first film makes that part clear during the baptism scene.

[grabbalacious]

Yeah he tried to get out and he couldn't. Perhaps the secret is not to get sucked in in the first place.

[barry-cotter]

Never seen the movies but in the book Michael absolutely could have gotten out. He chose not to because his honor would not suffer the insult to his family that occurred. He might have done differently if he hadn’t been in New York when the attack happened and the discussion over retaliation was going on. He was assumed to be on the outside. Sonny was in the family business. I don’t recall if Fredo was but Michael was thinking of becoming a professor and moving far from New York and the family.

[philwelch]

That's my understanding of the first film as well. Michael, like most tragic heroes, was brought down by his own pride. Gangster and crime stories are often better understood as forms of tragedy; Scarface and Breaking Bad are also tragedies about men brought down by pride (and, in the case of Scarface, many of the other seven deadly sins as well).

[rusk]

Loyalty to family outweighed his personal ambitions. A common existential struggle.

[rusk]

He was born into it ... he didn’t have a choice that’s the point. It’s as much a riff on free-will vs determinism

[grabbalacious]

But to begin with he was somewhat aloof from his father and brothers and he decided to kill that police captain. As I recall.

[kd0amg]

Michael is the one Vito was trying to keep clean in hopes that he'd eventually be able to rise into a position of legitimate power, outside the criminal underworld.